Discovery Program
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NASA's Discovery Program is a series of lower-cost, highly focused scientific space missions. It was founded to implement NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin's vision of "faster, better, cheaper" planetary missions.
Completed missions:
- NEAR Shoemaker, a mission to study asteroids, succeeded in its goals and is now defunct, having successfully landed on 433 Eros.
- Mars Pathfinder, a Mars lander with a miniature rover, completed its mission and is now defunct.
- Lunar Prospector, a Moon orbiter, achieved its objectives and was deliberately crashed onto the Moon's surface.
Partially successful missions:
- Genesis, a mission to collect solar wind particles, successfully did so, but the return capsule's parachute failed to deploy and the capsule crashed into the Utah desert; preliminary reports suggest that some of the samples survived the impact and that a good deal of scientific data may still be learned from them.
Failed missions:
Missions in progress:
- Stardust, a mission to a collect samples from a comet's tail, has successfully collected its samples, and is on its way to Earth to return them.
- MESSENGER, a mission to Mercury, was launched in August, 2004, and is on its way to the planet via a circuitous route.
- ASPERA-3 is a 'Discovery Mission of Opportunity' (a NASA-designed instrument on board another space agency's spacecraft). It is designed to study the interaction between the solar wind and the atmosphere of Mars, and is on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.
- Deep Impact, a mission to study a comet by crashing a probe into it, launched on January 12, 2005.
Forthcoming missions:
- Dawn, to be launched in 2006, is a mission to study the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta.
- The Kepler Space Observatory, scheduled for launch in 2007, will use a unique spaceborne telescope specifically designed to search for Earth-like planets around stars beyond our solar system.
Forthcoming Discovery highlights
- July 4, 2005 : Deep Impact close encounter with Comet Tempel 1
- January 15, 2006 : Stardust returns samples to Earth
- June, 2006 : Launch of Dawn mission
- October, 2006 : MESSENGER's first flyby of Venus
- June, 2007 : MESSENGER's second flyby of Venus
External link
- Official NASA website for Discovery Project (http://discovery.nasa.gov/)hu:Discovery-program